nVidia Beta Drivers Help Dragon Age II

Difficulties with running Dragon Age II on nVidia-based graphics cards may finally be coming to an end. They date back to the game’s launch, when attempting to use the official High Definition Texture pack to play at the highest graphic settings produced single-digit frame rates and the severe terrain corruption pictured above.

These problems were eventually resolved by a driver update, only to be replaced by a new crashing problem in the very next revision. Ironically, the 275.33 drivers that triggered the crashes included substantial performance enhancements for The Witcher 2, forcing some RPG fans to pick which of the year’s big releases was more important to them.

Then late last week, nearly two months after the problems were first reported, nVidia released 280.19 beta drivers which seem to have finally fixed the problem. The Dragon Age II crash is not specifically mentioned in the release notes, but following some positive reports on Bioware’s forums I gave the game about six hours of play across a few days and found no problems at all. Bioware’s Rob Bartel confirmed in a forum post that the 280 beta “seems to have fixed a lot of issues,” but held back from recommending an upgrade until more testing was done.

nVidia’s beta drivers can be acquired from their main site, linked above, while Dragon Age II’s latest patch and array of DLC — including the newly released “Legacy” quest line — can be found on the game’s official site.